Hi Lobsters! I’ve been frustrated with standard GUI-based design tools, because they don’t match the way I think: like a programmer, in terms of relationships and abstractions. (Does this resonate with the community here?)
So I’ve been hacking on this new DSL for design that allows the designer to specify figures in terms of relationships, which are compiled down to constraints and solved using an SMT solver. This also leads to good support for abstraction, because constraints compose nicely.
The system is still a WIP, but it’s usable enough that I made all the figures and diagrams in my latest paper and presentation with it, so I thought I’d write up a blog post about it and share some results.
This post is about how I think about design and how the programming language implements this philosophy. It also contains a number of case studies of designing real figures with the tool.
There are also some (probably useless?) but really amusing results, like what happens if you solve figures via gradient descent (the result is oddly satisfying).
I’d love to hear what you all think about the ideas in the post. Do you share any of my frustrations with existing design tools? How do you think when doing design – does your model match mine, or is it something different? Do you currently use any design tools that you’re really happy with, that I should know about?
I was reading the post and thinking how awesome it would be to have this in racket, and then I saw at the end that you were doing exactly that :) looking forward to seeing it!
Hmm. I might actually use Basalt for something, someday. Thanks for sharing it! I make a fair amount of diagrams in my work, but I’ve found it’s usually easier to just draw them freehand. There are definitely exceptions, though.
Just skimming through your post, I’m a little surprised to see no mention of TeX, from which TikZ/PGF has sprung. There are quite a few TeX packages and macros which use the constraint-solving machinery of the system to good effect, e.g. asymptote and other more domain-specific packages. I can understand why TeX may not fit your use cases, but it might be worth looking through CTAN for ideas anyway. I think having interactive sliders and instant feedback is very helpful, since (in my experience) modeling the visual optimization problem in sufficient detail is often more work than it’s really worth. Even if you’re going for a fully automated solution eventually, having a ‘visual REPL’ is very helpful for development.
As for iterative ‘force-directed’ (effectively gradient descent) graph layout, it seems to be a very common feature of web-based graph rendering libraries nowadays. GraphViz of course does constraint solving of some sort, but I’ve never looked into the details.
Have you looked at Apple’s auto layout system or the underlying Cassowary incremental solver? I’m not sure it is powerful enough for your application but it is fairly fast: http://www.badros.com/greg/cassowary/js/quaddemo.html
Very interesting and looks great. I have been wanting a system like this but for 3D layout of woodworking projects because I also dislike clicking around repetitively in visual software, and I don’t really enjoy SolidWorks or SketchUp; I want to just define my furniture in language. Nice to know that Z3 works well, when I started to think about this I got bogged down with trying to understand linear solvers but SMT is easier for me to grok…
Totally agree with you on certain solvers being hard to work with – it always causes a bit of friction to have to express an optimization problem in the form that the solver expects. If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend trying out Z3’s Python API. I’ve been super happy with it. Z3 doesn’t require you to specify which theories you are working with, or anything like that, and you don’t have to write down your equations in a certain way. You just write what look like regular equations in a fairly natural style, using their DSL, then run solver.solve(), and it just works!
Hi Lobsters! I’ve been frustrated with standard GUI-based design tools, because they don’t match the way I think: like a programmer, in terms of relationships and abstractions. (Does this resonate with the community here?)
So I’ve been hacking on this new DSL for design that allows the designer to specify figures in terms of relationships, which are compiled down to constraints and solved using an SMT solver. This also leads to good support for abstraction, because constraints compose nicely.
The system is still a WIP, but it’s usable enough that I made all the figures and diagrams in my latest paper and presentation with it, so I thought I’d write up a blog post about it and share some results.
This post is about how I think about design and how the programming language implements this philosophy. It also contains a number of case studies of designing real figures with the tool.
There are also some (probably useless?) but really amusing results, like what happens if you solve figures via gradient descent (the result is oddly satisfying).
I’d love to hear what you all think about the ideas in the post. Do you share any of my frustrations with existing design tools? How do you think when doing design – does your model match mine, or is it something different? Do you currently use any design tools that you’re really happy with, that I should know about?
I was reading the post and thinking how awesome it would be to have this in racket, and then I saw at the end that you were doing exactly that :) looking forward to seeing it!
Hmm. I might actually use Basalt for something, someday. Thanks for sharing it! I make a fair amount of diagrams in my work, but I’ve found it’s usually easier to just draw them freehand. There are definitely exceptions, though.
Just skimming through your post, I’m a little surprised to see no mention of TeX, from which TikZ/PGF has sprung. There are quite a few TeX packages and macros which use the constraint-solving machinery of the system to good effect, e.g. asymptote and other more domain-specific packages. I can understand why TeX may not fit your use cases, but it might be worth looking through CTAN for ideas anyway. I think having interactive sliders and instant feedback is very helpful, since (in my experience) modeling the visual optimization problem in sufficient detail is often more work than it’s really worth. Even if you’re going for a fully automated solution eventually, having a ‘visual REPL’ is very helpful for development.
As for iterative ‘force-directed’ (effectively gradient descent) graph layout, it seems to be a very common feature of web-based graph rendering libraries nowadays. GraphViz of course does constraint solving of some sort, but I’ve never looked into the details.
I’ve used TikZ before, but not the other TeX-based drawing packages. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll look into those!
Have you looked at Apple’s auto layout system or the underlying Cassowary incremental solver? I’m not sure it is powerful enough for your application but it is fairly fast: http://www.badros.com/greg/cassowary/js/quaddemo.html
Very interesting and looks great. I have been wanting a system like this but for 3D layout of woodworking projects because I also dislike clicking around repetitively in visual software, and I don’t really enjoy SolidWorks or SketchUp; I want to just define my furniture in language. Nice to know that Z3 works well, when I started to think about this I got bogged down with trying to understand linear solvers but SMT is easier for me to grok…
Thanks :)
Totally agree with you on certain solvers being hard to work with – it always causes a bit of friction to have to express an optimization problem in the form that the solver expects. If you haven’t already, I’d highly recommend trying out Z3’s Python API. I’ve been super happy with it. Z3 doesn’t require you to specify which theories you are working with, or anything like that, and you don’t have to write down your equations in a certain way. You just write what look like regular equations in a fairly natural style, using their DSL, then run
solver.solve(), and it just works!